IF THE SHOE FITS

I’m sleepy.

Last night it was my turn to wake up in the middle of the night and be totally unable to get back to sleep and consequently spend hour after long dark hour pondering the imponderables, mulling over the big questions, those matters of life, death and taxes and watch the red LED numbers on the radio alarm clock dance their less than merry dance ’til dawn.

The mind can go to some dark places as you lie there thinking, and those thoughts are more than likely to be exactly the kind of thought that would keep you awake even if the stifling heat of another airless night wasn’t already doing so, but the mind can also look into some very crazy corners, too, and you can find yourself asking the sorts of questions that you might not feel compelled to ask in polite society, or if your mind was slamming down the safety defences and putting itself into gear before you find yourself opening your mouth.

But there are questions that need to be asked and, as I’m sitting here typing away and the mind is still away with the fairies and still trying to work out whether or not we successfully managed to get that hi-tech device known as a kettle to function correctly this morning, I can go ahead and ask them, risk the wrath of an unforgiving world as it collectively sucks in its breath and says “You can’t ask that…”

You see my mind has ventured into the choppy waters of considering the Paralympics, and those are waters into which you should only dip your toe with the very greatest of care so as to not cause offence. These are waters in which the wrong choice of phrase can land the phrase-maker in very hot water indeed, and so we must tread cautiously and plunge headlong with the very greatest of care.

However, it’s a question that bothers me and so I feel that I ought to ask it, if only to get a satisfactory answer. You see I’m not very well up on how the mysticism of the Olympics works. As far as I understand it, the “spirit” of the Olympics is “passed on” from city to city during the closing ceremony of the Olympic games and so the “magic dust” that was handed to and sprinkled upon London back in 2008 has now been given to Rio de Janeiro and so, presumably, no longer hangs over the south of England.

Two weeks later the Paralympics begin.

Does this mean that the “Olympic spirit” has left the country before the Paralympics occur? Or does the Paralympics have its own separate “bubble” of Olympicity that exists in a kind of parallel world to the “main event” and that countries could bid to host them separately from having the Olympic Games themselves? In which case, why isn’t the Paralympic “torch relay” going from town to town and, perhaps more to the point, why doesn’t the Olympic closing ceremony happen after BOTH sets of Games have been completed…?

Otherwise it’s just a matter of convenience that the host nation just happens to have built a load of state-of-the-art facilities that the Paralympics can be held in. I mean, the Winter Olympics now seem to exist in a completely separate and distinct universe to the Summer Games, so why isn’t the Paralympic version treated with quite the same reverence…?

I told you that it wasn’t a “comfortable” question…

Mind you, it could have been worse. Ever since Channel Four have been running their little pre-Olympic “moments” with the athletes I’ve been wondering about the running shoes of athletes with only one foot and, whilst I accept that it’s a very “awkward” question, I’m assuming that they have one very specialist, very well designed shoe designed for them and they don’t just simply get a pair “off the peg” as it were and throw one away or have to come up with some kind of an agreement to “pair up” with an other athlete with the opposite problem to deal with the “other” shoe…?

I told you that I hadn’t engaged my brain yet…

My mind has also ventured into darker waters and noticed that whilst the Olympics were on and attempting to show the world the very best of all things British, the main news story for the last week or more, on the rare occasions when the media could be bothered to mention such things existed, involved the death of a child and one of the very worst manifestations of family life in our allegedly “broken” Britain, so perhaps my cynicism is inappropriate and I should not be making light of the great achievements made in the name of the mighty juggernaut we call “sport” over the past few weeks.

After all, without such things to distract us, none of us would (or should) be able to get that much sleep if we allow a society to develop in which such things can happen…